Context: Recently, the British physicist Peter Higgs passed away at the age of 94. He had come up with the idea of the Higgs boson particle (also was known as the ‘God Particle’). After the experimental discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013.
About Higgs Boson:
- In 1964, Peter Higgs gave a theory related to how subatomic particles (building blocks of matter) get their mass. Here, he predicted the existence of a new particle (later named Higgs boson) that granted mass to fundamental particles.
- He suggested that just after the Big Bang, in the early stages, the fundamental particles did not have any mass. As the Universe cooled, an invisible force field got formed which has been termed as Higgs Field. The associated particles with the Higgs field are the Higgs Bosons.
- Any particle that interacted with the Higgs field got mass, and those particles that were left out of the Higgs field remained massless. The more a particle interacts with the Higgs field, the heavier it is.
- E.g., Photon (the particle that carries light) does not interact with the Higgs field and therefore has no mass.
- As these Higgs bosons grant mass to particles like electrons, quarks, etc. (the primary condition for existence of matter), they were termed as the ‘God particle’.
- Eventually, the Higgs boson was discovered by the Large Hadron Collider in 2012. (LHC is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator constructed by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research)